Thanks for all of your responses.
If your dd's teacher has a concern that she is not keeping up and in over her head re the expectations for K, and is recommending she repeat K, they need to offer some quantitative evidence supporting their concerns.
She is on a reading level 5, but only just. I forgot to ask at the last meeting what the range is and what the minimum expectation is at the end of K. I know from parents at other schools that for some schools the minimum is a 6 at the end of K, and other schools expect a 10. I do know they ability group students for literacy and DD goes with the group that goes to the support teacher. They also are expected to write a couple of descriptive sentences about things they have done, and DD struggles with this. I will be sure to ask about reading levels at the next meeting.
The parent's response was to switch back to public school to avoid having her child repeat K, and she had her child tutored over the summer by a reading specialist in an attempt to be sure her child wasn't behind peers in reading ability in first grade. What happened, in her case, was that the reading specialist found there was truly a learning challenge. But that's just one child in one situation. My experience as the parent of kids with 2e is that recognizing and deciphering reading challenges in young children is difficult due to the wide range of "typical" reading development plus the vary wide range of skills needed to read.
Yes this can be tricky. The psychologist said DD showed some potential signs of various types of Dyslexia, but that these signs were also common in early readers, and recommended that we keep an eye on how DD progresses. I certainly don't want to hold her back because of a LD.
I am a bit confused, though, trying to reconcile those extremely high reading-skills achievement scores with reading problems? Not sure what I am missing in terms of where she is having difficulty. If she can demonstrate specific skills at that kind of level, yet struggles to read in practice, that suggests you want to try and figure out what is different in the two scenarios. Vision, maybe, as a quasi-random thought? I don't know what the WJ tests look like, but I do know there's a big difference, if you have vision issues, between reading busy text vs reading single words on flashcards (with our reading remediation program, my DD almost never makes mistakes on the latter). Can you talk to tester, teachers, and from your own experience, and figure out what, exactly, is different from the tasks she performed on the WJ and the regular reading where you see struggle?
I think this is important too. I am not sure if perfectionism is playing a part here. With the math program they use, she was loving it the first time she tried it, until she got one wrong. Then she refused to do any more. I thought we had moved a bit past that, but she was doing the math last weekend, and she again wanted to stop when she made a mistake. So obviously an area for us to work on. I am wondering if this is causing her to resist reading instruction at school since it is challenging for her. She might just say, it's too hard, I can't do it instead of trying. That is another common thing for her, to avoid tasks that she finds challenging.
Vision is another possible issue. Thanks for your comments aeh. She has seen two behavioural optometrists. The first found tracking issues, and just wanted her to wear prism glasses, the second also found tracking and fatigue issues, and wanted further assessment and probably vision therapy, which we are not pursuing at the moment due to time and money constraints. She does wear prism glasses at school now. We will be consulting with an educational psychologist next week, and I plan to ask her opinion on vision therapy. I know many families here have seen great results with vision therapy.
Dude - your comments are interesting. I know within the family dynamic DD established herself as the non academic one. She would often ask me to stop talking when DS had asked a question about something and I was explaining the answer. I am not sure about the dumbing herself down for peers, but I do think she has partly formed her school identity in contrast to DS. Unfortunately she also compares herself with him and thinks he is much 'smarter'.
